Posted
by
pudge
on Tuesday January 11, 2005 @12:35AM
from the fake-but-accurate dept.

An independent review panel gave CBS News a scathing rebuke for its story last fall about President Bush's national guard service. The report noted that in a story that was neither fair nor accurate, and did a "disservice" to the American public, the CBS News staff had a "myopic zeal" to get the story first and gave a "rigid and blind defense" after it aired. The story's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired. Three other executives were asked to resign. The network, noting that he was scheduled for retirement from CBS Evening News in a couple of months, recommended no action be taken against Dan Rather.

Not likely. Republicans would have just blamed the liberal media, just as Democrats are now blaming the liberal media (and exit/internet pollsters) for overstating their position.

"The Media" is a real easy target to blame, because it basically refers to everything that's been said about you and anything that's supposed to alter people's perceptions about you. I mean, on the surface, blaming the media makes sense, but when you look at it a little deeper, The Media is obviously involved in the public's vote, since The Media is essentially what "educates" the public.

Anything you read, even government documents, have been written in such a way as to project an opinion or include a bias. There's no such thing as "unbiased reporting". Some reporting is factually inaccurate (that's why these people are getting fired, or so they say), some reporting is factually accurate but draws incorrect or very shaky conclusions (Michael Moore is basically the champion of this, with sentences like, "Could Bush have been plotting TO KILL YOU?), some reporting is factually accurate and draws correct conclusions when approached by the specific type of bias with which you read the media.

It would have been different because someone else was blaming "The Media", but other than that, probably not.

2004 was the Year Of The Blogger? Bringing down a shady and haphazard 'unbiased' report about a presidential candidate through fact-checking and plausibility is a powerful statement of the strength of the internets...

Or of coordinated efforts at distraction. Bush did go AWOL, it's just those documents that were apparently forgeries. And IIRC they were forgeries of documents that did, according to eyewitnesses, exist.

I don't know about always, but I do find it extremely plausible that Bush went AWOL, and that the facts seem to back it up. This entire controversy seems mostly rhetorical sleight-of-hand to deflect attention away from that.

Don't look now, but you're dangerously close to becoming an apologist for CBS... They screwed up. They've admitted it. The real tragedy here is that Dan Rather isn't also being punished as well. He gets special treatment for being a "name."

What the hell are you talking about? You prefer to just say "thanks for proving my point" without any explaination? What the hell do you mean? The story is about CBS's forged documents. Where is the sleight of hand?

I hate being involved with flame wars, but his point was that the forged documents are drawing attention away from Bush's AWOL story, and you proved his point (supposedly) by mentioning the documents instead of the AWOL story.

The argument is absolutely circular, if you admitted Bush went AWOL and forgot about the documents, he would be right, and if you say the documents are forgeries and bullshit evidence, he's right (so he says) because you're focusing on the Documents and not the AWOL itself.

Even if you assumme the documents were planted by the Republicans, CBS was a bunch or morons for believing them.

And they certainly were just acting like idiots, not like the "vast left-wing conspiracy" so many believe. If they were evil they certainly would not have released the document images if even one person there said "these look fake".

Rather still stands by the story. The old coot has lost it. Sadly, he is just the poster child of what is wrong with the main stream media. They are used to watching others but sure shrivel up when the light is turned on them.
Booyah to all the unwashed masses in their pajamas. I think that this year has shown a step forward for democracy and the citizenry taking back the country from the elites.
Next target should be lifetime Congress Critters. Let's start with my state, and oust McCain.

Hm. I am in favor of term limits and ousting career politicians, but one of the greatest problems with career politicians is that they secure their positions through pork, and McCain is one of the few who tries to stand against that practice. Let's save McCain for the end, and start with Ted Kennedy instead.:-)

I am for this type of action, and I do support targeting Kennedy first. But for the love of all that is praiseworthy and of good report let's not target someone because of their political affiliations. Both sides have politicans that need to be ousted.

I didn't mention Kennedy because he is a Democrat, but because he is the best example of the two things I was talking about (too many years in Congress, and too much pork sent back home [e.g., the Big Dig]), and because he is from "my" state (well, I lived there 20 years, and until recently).

I won't defend McCain on his bogus election reform efforts. I just think that if you're gonna start bumping long-term incumbents, he shouldn't be at the top of the list, because one of my main interests in getting rid of incumbents relates to pork.

Since both of my senators are on their first term, and my representative is on his second (third?) term, I can't say they are long term incumbents, though I agree those who are in that situation need to start voting them out. I wasn't going to vote for my representative, except his opponent was truly awful and the third parties didn't have good options.

It gets to the point where your Republican senator has been there since time-immemorial, is a committee chair, and even though you disagree with him on everything, you still think, "Well, what could a freshman Democrat do for me? Is this guy really that bad? I mean, he's bringing home $50 million in "free" money for a fake indoor rain-forest that no one wants... Yay, our state!"

Does explain how one of the tightest races in last year's Presidential election sti

Technically, probably. But realistically, not really. Like Cecil says [straightdope.com], he was just a pampered rich kid who took advantage. It wasn't AWOL so much as his immediate superiors not caring if he did things that were technically against the rules. AWOL implies a situation that wasn't present here, he didn't desert. It seems like his immediate superiors said "sure, go" but his paperwork was denied and no one on either base really cared because they already told him to go.

Don't forget the missing record angle. If these memos existed, they are missing now. Records of his service, if any, are also missing. Since he got an honerable discharge, I find it hard to believe these document ever existed. Without a time machine and a good invisibility suit we can't know for sure. Some of the people involved are dead.

The story is accurate. There was plenty of other evidence besides phony memos. Which makes me suspect Karl Rove as the source of the forged memos, since the forgeries effectively cut off legitimate discussion of this issue. Now conservatives can just laugh off the charges and blame them on the phony memos rather than actually respond to them.

Has anyone else here noticed an extreme lack of scrutiny of the source of the documents? No interview in which he's asked why he did it. He never made a public statement explaining how he created the documents. Ironic that the story about CBS not asking the tough questions is not asking any of the hard questions.

We don't know where the documents originally came from, last I saw (I've not read the whole report). Burkett says he got them from someone, but won't say whom. And Burkett maintains he thinks they are real.

Wasn't it some mystery woman on an animal show who gave them to him, and then he copied them and burned the "originals"? That's the latest I heard, but I didn't pay attention during Christmas. (Tsunami etc.)

I agree - this is the most interesting aspect of this story; that nobody seems to want to investigate who forged the documents. I have my suspicions and they're on the right, not the left, of the political spectrum. I have no evidence for that other than Rove's history of dirty tricks and the fact that this incident ONLY benefited the Bush conservatives. But that's circumstantial at best -- it could very well have been a liberal DUMBASS who thought it would be a good idea to forge documents. But I suspe

But how could they know that CBS would be so gullible as to fall for some.doc's?

My theory: It started as a joke when the Bush AWOL story started circulating. Then it got passed on from hand to hand gaining credibility; in which case there's some prankster sitting around both snickering/crying and fearing prosecution.

Or it could be this Martin Heldt guy that started researching it and was told that he didn't have a smoking gun.

Then there's the shady hand-overs, Burkett claiming copying them and then burn

"But how could they know that CBS would be so gullible as to fall for some.doc's?"

At that level of the media, the social networks are unbelievable. eg. Brit Hume plays tennis with Bush Sr., going all the way back to when he was the ABC Whitehouse correspondent. Perhaps the social bond between the source and a producer, Dan Rather, etc, was strong enough that there was no question of their authenticity -- not knowing that their source was duped, or maybe their source's source. Ever play the game "Telephon

Of course the CBS producers should be accountable for publishing simulated memos. But, lost in the story of the memos, is the fact that the story of Bush skipping Vietnam out of privilege was verified in their story, outside of the simulated documentation. They put the secretary in the office at the time, who said the memos were fake, on the air, where she said that the story itself was true, in her eyewitness experience. Others party to Bush's favorable treatment also gave their eyewitness accounts, corrob

Mapes was actually told, by more than one person, that the unit actually DIDN'T have a waiting list for becomming a fighter pilot.There were waiting lists for becomming a regular enlisted man (ground crew etc.) in the TANG, though. (One of the guys said they didn't have a waiting list at ALL.)

Mapes was also told that after training, Bush Jr. volunteered to go to Vietnam, a request that was denied because he had to few flying hours.

BTW: Is David Boise's schedule free to represent her in the wrongfull termi

Actually, skipping out on "service" in the abomination that was Vietnam was not itself a bad act. Even if out of cowardice, rather than morality or politics - the meatgrinder was in full swing. No, what makes Bush a bad person is his many reactions *after* getting his break. Lying about it (often badly), criticizing Kerry, a Vietnam hero, for lacking patriotism (either personally, or tacitly by heading a presidential campaign that pursued that vile agenda). Sending a new generation of disadvantaged people i

And when we hear the details of the AWOL episode itself, they're in the form of fake memos that torpedo the entire story. Where did those memos actually come from? It's the flipside of the Iraq/Niger uranium story: those memos were faked, but they were enough to send Congress into a panic, authorizing some kind of war enough for Bush to invade Iraq. Where was the media frenzy over those fake memos? At the root of it, who is counterfeiting them for media/political consumption? Probably the same little covert

The Niger forgeries had little if anything to do with the decision to go to war. They were not known by (at least most of) Congress when they authorized war, and they were uncovered as forgeries before the war began.

Also, they were never mentioned by Bush (who, INSTEAD of referencing these memos, referenced British intel, which was based on something else) or Powell (who excluded that information from his speech to the UN because it was too questionable).

No, the story was also corroborated by Ben Barnes [salon.com], then Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor. And others corroborated the eyewitess accounts of more recent destruction of records, like record books in trash cans. The story is plain as day, though Bush tried to bury it in avalanche after avalanche of incomplete, though announced as "final" and "thorough" documents of his service. There's lots of evidence for his favor, and not nearly enough of even the cushy service he was offered, that he apparently blew of

No, the story was also corroborated by Ben Barnes, then Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor.

Er, no. Barnes became Tx Lt. Governor in 1969, a year after Bush started his training with the TANG in 1968. Now, in 1968 Barnes was Speaker for the House in Texas, and was friends with the head of the TANG, James Rose. Supposedly, a family friend named Sidney Adger asked Barnes to do a favor for the Bush's and Barnes talked to Rose. Rose and Adger are both dead, so no corroboration or denial, but it doesn't r

OK, without Barnes as Lt. Gov yet, it was harder to hook Bush up, a longer chain of favors. But they did, and Barnes got the Lt. Gov. job after doing the nice favor for that nice Mr. Bush. Since Barnes has confessed, until there's similarly credible denial of his story, it's incriminating. There is no such denial, or credible denial of any of the facts in the story. While the corroboration is available all over the place, and from witnesses with little to gain, and much to lose.

OK, without Barnes as Lt. Gov yet, it was harder to hook Bush up, a longer chain of favors. But they did...

You're really reaching at this point. So *if* Barnes' word was golden, and *if* whoever he might have talked to listened and *if* that person had the power to get Bush into the guard (basically, the current Lt. Governor), then at best Barnes has a hearsay testimony that Bush might have gotten preferential treatment.

Combine this with the fact that the CBS report from yesterday contains testimony fro

Also, again, Barnes was a DEMOCRAT who told Dan Rather he did NOT know if Bush got any preferential treatment (that is, he did not know if his call to the ANG had any influence over the decision to accept him).

No, it was not. Check again. He specifically said he did not know if Bush got preferential treatment. As the CBS report this week said, "Barnes stated, however, that he did not know if his call to a TexANG official back in 1968 made any difference with respect to President Bush."

then Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor

No, he was last year the Democrat Texas Lt. Governor, and campaigned heavily for Kerry at the time he gave CBS the interview. At th

I wonder how much exactly did Dan Rather have to do with the story? I mean, is his job literally just to read whatever the behind the scenes people write? Or does he actually have some input into writing the stories and doing the research, etc. While he's "retiring" and they're not doing anything to him its a tremendously transparent cop out. But I wonder if its justified. If his job is really to just read whatever they tell him to, then he should be completely absolved of all fault.

Besides, a little house cleaning couldn't hurt. The news can stand to lie a little less.

I thought taking risks by trusting sources is something journalists did regularly. Woodward and Bernstein did this and happened to be right. Now we treat them and their investigative reporting as ideals of the fourth estate. I just hope the backlash from this incident doesn't make journalists too cautious when reporting the news for fear of being wrong, or worse, being labeled as biased.

I just hope the backlash from this incident doesn't make journalists too cautious when reporting the news for fear of being wrong, or worse, being labeled as biased.

I don't know what "too" cautious is to your mind, but if it means "a lot more cautious than they are now," then I hope it certainly does have this effect. Woodward and Bernstein and their editors were extremely cautious, far moreso than Mapes and Rather.

Be careful about the Slashdot story. It does not say what you might imagine it says. Below are quotes from a video of a CBS newscast, CBS Panel's Conclusions [cbsnews.com]:

"The story wasn't ready." "The panel did not conclude the documents were forgeries." "We didn't find any actual [political] bias." "Mary Mapes said she still believes the documents were well corroborated."

NOTE: CBS has recently begun offering videos of its most important newscasts online, mostly without commercials. The videos display only in Internet Explorer, not the latest versions of Mozilla or Firefox. CBS uses Javascript in poor ways, there are problems with its video servers, and some videos have been edited incorrectly for transmission. I get different results at different times. I complained to CBS about this about two weeks ago in connection with another story, and did not receive a reply. They seem to be working on the problems, since delivery has changed and improved in the last two weeks. Ignore messages that say, "Could not connect to remote server." I could not play the videos with the latest version of Opera, which is quite compatible with IE-specific coding, but that may have been because of my specific installation.

Note that the quotes from the CBS newscast don't say that CBS has decided the story was false. CBS only fully accepts its responsibility for sloppiness in the preparation of the story.

Also, the CBS focus was misleading. The real story was that George W. Bush disappeared from Air National Guard records in exactly the same month that the ANG instituted drug testing.

Lt. Bush's reported behavior was consistent with the known behavior of alcoholics, and Bush has admitted to being an alcoholic. Alcoholics often use other drugs to heighten the desired effects of alcohol and to try to diminish the undesired effects.

I served in the U.S. Air Force in the years around the time that Lt. Bush served, and I was stationed at a base that had the aircraft he flew. The CBS documents were consistent with the operation of the Air Force at that time, which was remarkably tolerant of alcoholism. The entire U.S. culture at the time was tolerant of alcoholism, but the USAF as I experienced it was even more so.

I have specific, detailed knowledge that the Air Force was far more corrupt than has been reported in stories I've seen. For example, F-106 aircraft, the successors to the F-102 aircraft that Lt. Bush flew, had severe defects in their inertial guidance systems that meant that F-106s were often not available to perform their mission. This was not a conscious conspiracy; they could not get the systems to work properly, and apparently all USAF departments tended to cover up failures rather than report them sufficiently. Remember that this was a time when people had far less technical knowledge than people generally have today.

At the time, no one would have found it remarkable that a pilot was an alcoholic, or that someone received special treatment because of political pressure. That was just the way things worked. This is so important that maybe I should repeat it: That's just the way things worked back then. Back then few adults had parents who had attended college. The accepted educational level was far less in a way that cannot be measured by the number of college years someone had.

I know about the failure in F-106s because I fixed the problem. I found that some of the amplifiers used in the inertial guidance system had parasitic oscillations because of solder joints of amazingly poor quality. At the time, I was familiar with all base operations that involved electronics repair, and I very much doubt there was anyone else on base who had enough technical knowledge to know what parasitic oscillations were. Mostly they just kept replacing things until they found that the symptom of the problem had gone away. We Slashdot readers take technical knowledge for granted, but widespread te

But their document expert concluded, categorically, that the documents were produced on a computer after the 1970s. That's pretty close to saying "forgery". The only reservations against declaring them a forgery, that I can think of, is that they were copies, that time travel could be at play here, or the remote possibility that they were indeed TANG documents about ANOTHER Lt. Bush from the 1990s misdated to the 1970s.

"We didn't find any actual [political] bias."

To do that Mapes & Co would have to admit it, or submit to polygraphs or whatever. But Mapes' emails show how she was trying to get the documents from Bill Burkett by connecting him with the DNC, and by getting him a book deal. Something about affecting the momentum of the campaign.

But is bias onlyt a clearly stated policy of working for one of the candidates, which she came pretty close to doing, or is bias also letting yourself be affected by wishing that the story is true?

Something rather unimportant to our world today turned into quite farce. But aren't anybody going to look at WHO actually made the documents? It's illegal to forge military documents, and some states have laws against trying to influence elections with false documents.

If the machines were not adjusted correctly, adjoining letters would have a different vertical baseline. That's because adjoining letters in English words were different from the adjoining letters in the machine. The photocopying introduced serious distortions, but not so much in letters that were next to each other.

There is no difference between Microsoft Times New Roman and anyone elses' Times New Roman. Linotype licenses them all, and is not about to corrupt their most famous font. "Microsoft Times New Roman" merely refers to Microsoft's license from Linotype. Anyhow, the fonts used in the CBS Bush documents are definitely NOT the Time New Roman font. They merely use the same spacing, like hundreds or maybe even thousands of fonts.

There's really no need to rely on me for information about this subject. Just go to your local library and find magazines from the 1970s. You will find lots of Times New Roman, and you can see the letter spacing and line spacing yourself. You need a magazine that published in ragged right, the same as the CBS Bush documents. Try People Magazine, for example.

When Microsoft Times New Roman was introduced, the entire point was not to irritate those who had decades of experience with typesetting Times New R

It seems that there is always some uninformed person who posts comments to
stories like this who doesn't realize that both U.S. President George W. Bush
and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney were both active alcoholics. So, here are
some of their arrest records:

Bush and Cheney are the most arrested U.S. president and
vice-president in history. George W. Bush was arrested once for the crime of
DUI and Dick Cheney twice:

The panel's scope was limited to looking at the existing evidence and determining what the journalists did wrong. So they cannot say the documents were forged, they can only say there was not enough evidence supporting them to justify their use, etc.

Their job was to say how well the journalists acted, and their conclusion was "poorly."

That said, they did note all through their report that many statements in the CBS stories were "not accurate" or "inaccurate" and such, and several other parts of the story

... but little attention has been paid to the communications between CBS news and the Kerry campaign.

Let me back up a bit.

When the entire 'memogate' deal started, I held out. I kept saying, "I trust Rather. I trust CBS". Sure Rather is biased. It's fairly obvious to anyone to takes a look. But he has a great history behind him. That history was hard to ignore. It took me a few days to see the memos for what they really were. And when I did, I was upset. And when Rather continued to defend them, in spite of CBS's own document experts coming forward saying they NEVER validated the documents, I got pissed.

When it came out that there was at least SOME communication between CBS and the Kerry campaign and the story aired the same flippin' time the "Fortunate Son" BS started from the Kerry camp, I became livid.

Mapes claimed at the time that the only communication she had with the Kerry camp was when she put Burkett in touch with them. That, it turns out, was a lie. It appears Chad Clanton tells a story a bit different than Mapes.

As the report states, there is no evidence that the CBS piece was politically biased. Yet there is certainly quite a bit of circumstantial evidence that the driving force of this piece, Mapes, WAS politically motivated. No. Obsessed would be a better word. The apparent collusion between CBS news and the Kerry campaign was not addressed to my satisfaction. Her outright lies that the documents had a clear chain of custody, came from an 'unimpeachable' source and continued insistence of their accuracy -- it's just appalling. Add to this the links to the Kerry campaign and coincedental "Fortunate Son" ads, any reasonable person should suspect Mapes of being out to "get" Bush.

And that is what I suspect. I believe Rather stuck with story so long out of trust of Mapes. And I believe Mapes had an agenda that those around her refused to see. I'm glad Mapes was fired. I don't think she'll ever have a name in her field again. I have little doubt she'll write a book, make a bundle and retire. But she will no longer be working.

In the wake of these troubles, Dan Rather plans to turn to other matters after he retires in March. According to unnamed sources, Rather claims to have located Jack Ruby's Blackberry. He is going to use the information in it to reveal amazing breaththroughs in the JFK assassination.

Yes, CBS screwed up badly in 'Memogate' -- but so did those who covered the affair

By Corey Pein

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that's mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule. On September 8, just weeks before the presidential election, 60 Minutes II ran a s

I really like you highlight his attacks on the bloggers but not any actual *evidence* that his charges were true.

Booooring...

In order to understand "Memogate," you need to understand "Haileygate." David Hailey, a Ph.D. who teaches tech writing at Utah State University -- not a professional document examiner, but a former Army illustrator -- studied the CBS memos. His typographic analysis found that, contrary to widespread assumptions, the document may have been typed. (He points out, meanwhile, that beca

I'm cribbing from Jonah Goldberg here, but he nailed it this morning at NR...

"First, the CBS report was supposed to do many things, two of them were: 1) Authenticate/explain the origin of those documents and, 2) address the issue that the Memo story was politically motivated. The report punts on both. They can tell us that the blogs were politically motivated from a conservative perspective, but on the biases that caused this entire scandal, we get silence."

While CBS is doing the right thing in at least admitting that the whole mess is their fault, they're still trying to stonewall on the all important issue of bias. As the note above said, they didn't hesitate to ascribe a political motive to the bloggers that called foul on Rather's report, but refuse to shine the same harsh light on themselves. One of the four execs that were chopped was closely involved with the Kerry Campaign throughout the whole story, and the source of the forged documents themselves was desperately trying to GET into the Kerry Campaign. So this wasn't a simple case of a mistake in the haste to break a story. Long after a long line of experts testified that the docs looked faked (and badly faked, at that), Dan Rather and his team stonewalled and held fast to the position that the story was true, the documents were real, their source was, in Rather's words, "unimpeachable", and that complaints were simply right wing anger, nothing more. That's not a simple matter of "haste"; that's partisan warfare, sorry Dan, but calling it like it is here.

Rather, because of his star status, was allowed to gracefully step down from the anchor position. But his team got sacked. Sounds to me like they took one for the boss...

Rathergate neither proves, nor disproves, a pervasive liberal bias in the media, as the facts surrounding it are insufficient to such things. It's too small.

And I don't know how Myers, Greenfield, Glass, etc. disprove the liberal bias idea. They are liberals and they or their staffs did not get in trouble; doesn't that help PROVE the idea? And how does that tie into Rathergate anyway?

And yes, Kelley was worse than Blair, but who reads USA Today regularly? Who trusts it? Who had ever heard of any of the people involved? Sorry, it is necessarily a smaller story than what Blair did, because it was USA Today. Miller's another case, but what she did was -- journalistically -- not nearly as bad as what Blair did. Not even in the same universe.

Back to Rather, the problem is that never before has something like this hit someone so high up as him, and to compound matters, the network denied the truth for two weeks. Add to that the fact that it happened just before an election, and it was a powderkeg.

If that is really from Atrios, well, it's a good reason not to read his work.:-)

That said, it's clear that Mapes herself was anti-Bush. There's no question of it. The story itself -- even assuming all her facts were correct -- is an entire non-story, and yet she was willing to lie to get it told. What did she try to prove? That Bush's ANG attendance record was, for a time, poor? We knew that. It didn't prove he was AWOL, it didn't prove anything more than what we already knew, at best. Why spend so much time and effort on what we already know? The contention was that it was a rush to get a new story, but even stipulating all the evidence as actual facts, it was not a new story.

Even worse than the forged documents, which few have discussed, is the deal with Barnes. What did he have to say, do you recall? That he spoke to an ANG official on Bush's behalf, but that no one asked him to do it, and that he did not know if this had any impact on Bush's entrance into the ANG. And Mapes had spoken to several ANG officials who denied Bush received any preferential treatment, but those quotes were excluded, and she instead framed Barnes' words to give the unmistakable and entirely unsubstantiated impression that Bush did get preferential treatment. Oh yeah, and she neglected to mention Barnes was campaigning heavily for John Kerry. Oops.

Again, even if he did get preferential treatment, I don't consider that significantly newsworthy, and question the bias of anyone who does. But that she not only had no evidence -- not even claims -- that he received preferential treatment, and in fact had only claims that he did not, and still framed it as though he did, is clear and unmistakable evidence of bias.

If all this doesn't prove bias on the part of Mapes, I don't know what possibly could.

I think it's obvious that the people who investigate and report the news are more on the left than on the right by far, and that this bias creeps into the news often. I don't think there's any liberal conspiracy in the media, and that the greatest bias in the media is to get a big story. But this was not Mapes' problem. Sure, there were other pressures, but it's entirely obvious that her goal was to prove her story against the President, and damn the facts, and she deserves to be fired as much as Blair and Kelley and Glass.

I think it's obvious that the people who investigate and report the news are more on the left than on the right by far

OBVIOUS? How is this obvious? Either you have done extensive research on every news outlet in the USA (I'm assuming you mean "in the USA") and can tell by reading a story what the exact political leanings of all reporters are, or you've been watching too much of a certain cable news channel.

I remember Whitewater. Remember that? The media had a field day with that. The Clintons didn't do a damn thing wrong there. They lost money on that. That dragged on for years. The media just repeated whatever the Republicans said. (To be fair, they would then immediately go and repeat what the Democrats said. But the media is not supposed to be a fucking megaphone.) The investigation was quietly closed in

Are they too afraid of losing their white house press pass or something?

And that, my friend, is the real liberal media bias. It's not the media that are biased towards liberalism, quite the reverse actually. It's that liberals are biased towards the media. What passes for journalists these days reported on Whitewater with free abandon and reckless regard for the truth, with little or no follow up in the Rathergate mould, because they knew they could get away with it. That Clinton's equivalent of Karl Rov

Careful readers would realize I did not insist any such thing. I insisted that the journalists fall more on the left than the right, not that this results in significant journalistic bias. There's a big difference.

Careful readers would realize I did not insist any such thing. I insisted that the journalists fall more on the left than the right, not that this results in significant journalistic bias. There's a big difference.

And this is a classic right-wing propaganda technique. If you can muddy an argument that is not winnable on your side so that it becomes a draw, then you deny the other side a victory, which is just as important as winning it in the first place.

Consider how *often* we heard about blue dresses in the news, and how reports of faulty intelligence on Iraq came and went.

This is just stupid. Really stupid.

A Democratic attorney general tells Ken Starr to include this in his investigation. It's his job to prosecute the case, so he does the best job he can do. And this is all big news, because almost everyone wanted to know about it. Most news -- for good or ill -- is focuse

This is about purposely abusing the trust the American public has in certain news organizations to promote an agenda.

I suspect that if another news organization offered up such a ludicrous story about Kerry that the Blogs and rest of the media would jump on it as well.

What you see here is an end of an era. The scariest part of this ordeal is that before the advent of the net CBS's ploy would have worked, they were shouting down their naysayers. It makes you wonder just how many other stories about ANYTH

How about this: some of the documents were an insanely bad forgery. Humorously bad. They were easily recreated in Microsoft Word with the default settings. No settings need to be changed - the default margins, tab-stops, and font all matched up perfectly. Pixel-perfectly.

Some people have suggested that it might be possible to duplicate the memos on equipment available at the time. Well, it's 100% possible to duplicate the memos using Word without changing any settings, to a pixel-perfect degree. Whi

And now CBS is paying the price for admitting that they made a mistake.

Whoops, that's supposed to read "refusing to admit." If they had just admitted it was a forgery, there would likely be much less of a backlash and people wouldn't be paying the price now. And, if the claims turned out to be true, people might be more willing to listen to them. "Fool me once" and all that. (Someone else can dredge up the Bush quote.)

This isn't really a Democrat vs Republican thing. I would like to hope that if

I still remember Powell powerpointing the UN on Hussein's WMD. Most of it, it turned out, were excerpts from some "The Bourne Identity" style doctoral thesis of some foreign affairs researcher. I still look forward for Bush's, Rumsfeld's, Powell's, Rice's public apology for duping the whole bloody world... but that'll never happen... they'll keep on yakking about "Mission accomplished" and FOX will be there, as patriotic as ever... bah

And now CBS is paying the price for admitting that they made a mistake.

I know its is semantics, but they are paying the price for making a mistake, not admitting to a mistake. One of the reasons it seemed so egregious was their initial refusal to admit the mistake. They were eventually forced to admit the mistake by the facts of the situation.

What is the difference between firing somebody and asking them to resign?

An employee who is fired doesn't get a severance package. An employee who resigns, does.

Asking executives to resign is essentially giving them the golden parachute. They make some bogus statement ("I want to spend time with my family" or "It's time to move on") and they get to keep their loot.

It's part of the report, but it's hardly an ommission on the Slashdot editors' part.

If we had to cover all the relevant points, it would need a feature sized article.

- The firings.- The reasons given for the rush to air.- The reasons for the sone-walling and outright dismissal of any critisism- The suggested remedies.- Concluding that there was no bias, despite the evidence.- Coordinating with a political party.- Mapes' response.- The typography expert concluding that the documents were computer generated

Well, it's a lot like security vulnerability stories. We just had that front page story on a single relatively non-dangerous vunerability found in Linux because it is unusual. On the other hand a half dozen vulnerabilities in Windows - including critically dangerous ones - barely rates a single story that doesn't even hit the front page because it's pretty much routine and non-newsworthy.